PermVeg: a generic tool to design and assess crop rotations for permanent vegetable production systems

Open field vegetable production by smallholders is globally an important activity contributing to food and nutrition security, private sector development and rural income. The identification and ex-ante assessment of alternative vegetable rotations is increasingly important to develop vegetable systems that are able to fulfil multiple and potentially conflicting objectives.

As part of the Permveg Work package an easy to use software package has been developed to design and assess alternative vegetable rotations. The model combines vegetable crops to generate all possible crop rotations for a given period, based on a number of explicit criteria (objectives and restrictions) controlled by the user. The criteria eliminate in early stages those crop rotations that are undesirable. The criteria relate among others to the most important socio-economic and environmental factors in vegetable production, i.e. profitability, labour requirements and costs of pesticide use.

For who:

This tool is specifically of interest for researchers and lecturers at agriculture universities, trainers within horticulture development projects and extension workers.

Benefits

The tool is helpful to make objectives, assumptions and hard-to-quantify data explicit and to assess the potential consequences for profitable and sustainable horticulture production.

More information can be found in the manual that can be downloaded below.

Would you like to start using this free tool?

It only takes 3 steps:

1. Download the installer guideline and manual you find at the bottom of this page